Welcome! My name is Michael Gilday and I am a Short Track Speedskater from Yellowknife, NWT, Canada. I currently train at the National Training Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I've created this blog primarily to let family and friends know about competitions and travel. I also hope to educate a bit about short track and maybe even entertain. Enjoy!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Alright so first off a big thanks to anyone who reads the blog and has bought a box of specially marked General Mills cereal and entered the code online! Your support much appreciated. Right now we are at $311. But now that the ferry is open the boxes should be flowing into Yellowknife and hopefully lots of people will get out and enter a code! Just think, if each person in Yellowknife bought just one box of cereal and entered the code that would be almost $19000. Most everybody eats cereal and you have all the way until the end of February 2010 to get out and support Canada's Amateur athletes (and hopefully be slightly biased towards yours truly haha!) Also, starting in June, General Mills is running a special bonus. There will be Gold boxes of original Cheerios on the shelves of grocery stores. These special gold boxes will have $5 donation codes on them instead of the usual $1 codes. Of course you still submit the code the same way as before but the bonus is that the code is found on General Mills' best cereal, Original Cheerios and the codes are obviously worth five times as much. If you are wondering to yourself "where can I find info on which boxes to buy, or how to put in a code?", just click on the link that I have put on the right had side of my blog, just below my amazing sponsors logos.

Monday, May 25, 2009

I'm starting a new "feature" on the blog. It will be called things that are awesome day. I'll put a new one up whenever I find something that I think is awesome or that I might think would be awesome to pass along.

Today, for the first installment I give you the short highlights package on Carlos Sastre's epic win in the 16th stage of the Giro D'Italia. Today's stage was 237km long but had a TON of climbing and took the leaders just over seven hours to complete. Seven hours is crazy enough with all of the climbing they did but to be able to attack like Sastre did on the last climb of the day to Monte Petrano is awesome.

**Update** Check out a riders description of stage 16. This article is written by Michael Barry, a Canadian who rides for the Columbia Highroad Team. He is a very good writer and gives a very descriptive view of what he called one of the hardest days he has ever had on the bike.

Friday, May 22, 2009

A barrier was broken yesterday. The first lap under nine seconds of the season. Now I know for those of you who read this and are skaters you are going to think "are you kidding me???" or "good, those guys must be skating terribly" or something along those lines. But heres the catch. We aren't skating at the Oval right now. We have been on ice at another Calgary rink for the past two months. Its a quite cold rink with ice that has next to no glide when compared to the Oval. So when Wim de Deyne of Belgium went 8.98 seconds in a flyer (a single lap full out) yesterday it was a big moment. There had been alot of 9.0's and 9.1's but no one could break the 9.0 barrier (this is kind of ridiculous because on normal ice we would do somewhere in the 8.2-8.5 region). The ice was always too brittle, with too many ruts and too little glide.But finally the Quest for 8.9 was complete! Anyways in all seriousness it might be hard on the mind to not be anywhere close to a half decent lap time, but as long as we keep it in perspective as to why we aren't going super fast and look at the positives of being able to skate through the worst ice conditions we will see all year, we can be confident we are on the right track.

Also check out a new blog. Liam McFarlane is a teammate of mine and he started a blog earlier this week. You can find it here or on the side bar.